Population differentiation often reflects a balance between divergent natural selection and the opportunity for homogenizing gene flow to erode the effects of selection. However, during ecological speciation, trait divergence results in reproductive isolation and becomes a cause, rather than a consequence, of reductions in gene flow. To assess both the causes and the reproductive consequences o...

Geographical distributions of terrestrial or freshwater taxa that are broken up by oceans can be explained by either oceanic dispersal or vicariance in the form of fragmentation of a previously contiguous landmass. The validation of plate-tectonics theory provided a global vicariance mechanism and, along with cladistic arguments for the primacy of vicariance, helped create a view of oceanic dis...

The objective of this paper is to describe the potential o€ered by the Dempster±Shafer theory (DST) of evidence as a promising improvement on ``traditional'' approaches to decision analysis. Dempster±Shafer techniques originated in the work of Dempster on the use of probabilities with upper and lower bounds. They have subsequently been popularised in the literature on Arti®cial Intelligence (AI...

Physicists taking a first principle approach to biological research are making discoveries with broad implications for systems biology. In an era when high-throughput, hypothesis-free science makes most of the noise, pioneering physicists are stirring things up by taking a first principle approach to investigate how noise in gene expression impacts living organisms. They use statistical laws of...

Elucidating the origins of complex biological structures has been one of the major challenges of evolutionary studies. The bacterial flagellum is a primary example of a complex apparatus whose origins and evolutionary history have proven difficult to reconstruct. The gene clusters encoding the components of the flagellum can include >50 genes, but these clusters vary greatly in their numbers an...

The Actinopterygii (ray-finned fishes) is the largest and most diverse vertebrate group, but little is agreed about the timing of its early evolution. Estimates using mitochondrial genomic data suggest that the major actinopterygian clades are much older than divergence dates implied by fossils. Here, the timing of the evolutionary origins of these clades is reinvestigated using morphological, ...

BACKGROUND Coral reefs worldwide face a variety of threats and many coral species are increasingly endangered. It is often assumed that rare coral species face higher risks of extinction because they have very small effective population sizes, a predicted consequence of which is decreased genetic diversity and adaptive potential. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Here we show that some Indo-Paci...

the purpose of this study was to compare various direct techniques of measuring attitudes toward risk. the equally likely certainty equivalent with a purely hypothetical risky prospect (elce-ph), the equally likely certainty equivalent with a hypothetical but realistic risky prospect (elce-r) and probability of winning demanded (pwd) models were used to elicit the risk attitude of a sample ...

Abstract: Background: Rabies has been reported in all provinces and cities of Iran, although there has been no molecular study regarding different groups and subgroups of rabies virus by phosphoprotein gene. In this study, firstly, 48 and then 85 recent rabies isolates recovered from cases reported throughout Iran identified the evolutionary origins by molecular method of phosphoprotein gene r...